Monash-Warwick Global History Reading Lists – By Theme
1. Overview of lists, with short commentary
 Commentary discusses what each list ‘does’ (based on the
annotations people provided, or just titles).
 Some large lists could easily be broken into sub-themes
(especially ‘Trade’), but that’s perhaps a job for later.
 Some readings have appeared on more than one list.
(A) BACKGROUND
Theme 1: Overviews
These readings provide an overview by period (medieval, early modern,
modern). They take a synthesising, ‘big picture’ approach and aim to explain
transformations and their causes over time. They also engage with themes,
approaches, problems and disagreements in fields of global history.
1.1 Overview of the medieval period
1.2 Overview of the early modern period
1.3 Overview of the modern period
Theme 2: Historiography
Some of these readings overlap a with ‘Overviews’, but their key feature is
that they problematise approaches to global history and outline debates.
(B) NODES OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
These readings discuss where global history happens, in terms of sites of
encounter and exchange.
Theme 3: Oceans
Theme 4: Cities
Theme 5: The Body
(C) MODES OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
These readings provide case studies of how global history happens, in terms of
types of encounter and exchange, networks, and structures of
encounter/exchange.
Theme 6: Trade (Movement of goods and services)
Theme 7: Technology (Movement of goods and services)
Theme 8: Diaspora and migration (Movement of people)
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Theme 9: Travel (Movement of people)
Theme 10: Religion (Movement of ideas)
Theme 11: Science (Movement of ideas)
Theme 12: Ideology (Movement of ideas)
Theme 13: Ecology and Environment (Movement of biota)
Theme 14: Disease (Movement of biota)
Theme 15: Empires (Structures of encounter)
Theme 16: Institutions (Structures of encounter)
(D) REPRESENTATIONS OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
These readigs provide case studies of how the world and global encounters
have been imagined and represented – visually, textually, and in material
cultures.
Theme 17: Maps and cartography
Theme 18: Art and performance
[See also Trade, Travel, and Empires – These readings often focus on representation,
eg. Trade (still life paintings as representations of luxury trade goods); Travel (travel
literature); Empires (ethnographic photographs of ‘natives’).]
(E) USES OF GLOBAL HISTORY
These readings use global history approaches to examine a major historical
problem – in this case, the nature and causes of uneven development. Includes
much of the ‘world systems’ literature, as well as the challenge to ‘rise of the
west’ narratives that came out of area studies, postcolonial and ‘third world’
studies etc.
Theme 19: Explaining uneven development
(F) MISCELLANEOUS
These were the readings that didn’t seem to fit into any list . (And I thought 19
lists was probably enough).
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2. Lists by Theme
(A) BACKGROUND
Theme 1: Overviews
1.1 Overview of the medieval period
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century:
Dead-End or Precursor?”, in Michael Adas, ed., Islamic and European
Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993): 75-102.
Important reflection on the structure of exchange in a pre-modern multi-centred
world. It summarises a great deal of the argument presented in her famous book.
Proposes the existence of a thirteenth-century World System involving a
network of trade across the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Conceptualising this global
system as overlapping “circuits” of exchange, Abu-Lughod emphasises how the
globally integrated network was made of regional and local economic
interactions in a multi-centred pre-modern world.
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D 12501350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Examines the development of a thirteenth century world system. Built around
an “archipelago of towns,” the system was uneven but it was also extensive
enough to be truly global. An ambitious attempt to identify global networks in
an earlier period.
Secondary reading : Victor Lieberman, “Abu-Lughod's Egalitarian World
Order. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.3
(1993): 544-550.
1.2 Overview of the early modern period
C. A. Bayly, ‘From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa
1600–2000’, in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History,
ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Anand Yang, Honolulu, 2005.
Argues for the existence of a period of archaic globalization that was
underpinned by three developments: universalizing kingship, the expansion of
cosmic religions and understandings of bodily health. An innovative analysis of
early forms of global networks.
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
Argues that there was an Ottoman Age of Exploration that parallels European
developments. Demonstrates that “Ottomans of the sixteenth century were able
to act as protagonists of the first order in creating a newly integrated world
system of competing imperial states.”
Harold John Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in
the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
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Jan de Vries, “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World,”
Economic History Review 63.3 (2010): 710-733.
Dennis Owen Flynn & Arturo Giráldez, China and the Birth of Globalization
in the 16th Century (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2010).
Jack Goldstone, “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises
in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey and Ming China,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 30.1 (1988): 103-142.
The decline of empires has often been examined individually. Here Goldstone
argues for a general reconfiguration of world power in the 17th century.
Robert Marks, Origins of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002.)
Global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present
that gives a balanced focus on Asia, Africa, and the New World. Defines the
modern world as one marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a
large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world.
Anne E. McCants, “Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of
Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Journal of
World History 28.4 (2007): 433-462.
Anthony Reid, “Global and Local in Southeast Asian History,” International
Journal of Asian Studies 1 (2004): 5-21.
Summarizes the argument of Reid’s famous age of commerce theory. Highlights
an alternating pattern of globalization and localization in Southeast Asian history
with peaks of integration between 1450-1680 and 1780-1840.
Secondary reading: Victor Lieberman, “An Age of Commerce in Southeast
Asia? Problems of Regional Coherence: A Review Article,” Journal of Asian
Studies 54.3 (1995): 796-807.
John Richards, “Early Modern India and World History,” Journal of World
History 8.2 (1997): 197-210.
Ambitious attempt to define the key features of the early modern world. Richard
argues for the existence of six “worldwide processes of change [that were]
unprecedented in their scope and intensity.”
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a
Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997):
735-762.
This article provides a series of reflections on what connections might be in early
modern history. Students love it.
A concise series of reflections on what connections might be in early modern
history, and a reassertion of these against alternative traditions of nationalism
and historical ethnography. Subrahmanyam does not necessarily deny
difference, but does emphasise connection.
F. Trivellato, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent
Historical Work,” Journal of Modern History 82.1 (2010): 127-155.
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1.3 Overview of the modern period
David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c. 1760-1840 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Paul Bairoch and Richard Kozul-Wright, “Globalization Myths: Some
Historical Reflections on Integration, Industrialization and Growth in the
World Economy,” in R. Kozul-Wright and R. Rowthorn eds., Transnational
Corporations and the Global Economy (New York: St. Martins, 1998): 37-68.
A clear and simple analysis of economic globalization by one of France’s best
economic historian.
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (New York: John Wiley
& Sons, 2004): Introduction and Ch. 1.
Already a classic, Bayly argues for the age of revolutions as a moment of change
in world history.
C. A. Bayly, “’Archaic’ and A-Modern Globalization in the Eurasian and
African Arena, c. 1750-1850,” in A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World
History (London: Pimlico, 2002).
A very sophisticated and engaging reading. An attempt to present a classification
of globalization ‘before globalization’. One of Bayly’s best pieces.
Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History:
Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of
World History 13 (2002): 323-90.
Explores standard concepts relating to economic expansion and the Western
political hegemony (e.g. “modern”, “pre-modern”, etc.), arguing that these
overshadow analysis of economic, political, and social differences affecting
economic development across the globe.
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992): 131-62 (“The Apogee of Nationalism,
1918-1950”).
Now a bit dated, but still a great survey of the spread and adaptation of a
European concept.
Robert Marks, Origins of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002.)
Global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present
that gives a balanced focus on Asia, Africa, and the New World. Defines the
modern world as one marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a
large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world.
Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological
Narrative 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Tries to construct a non-Eurocentric world history, largely emphasizing
economic growth and state power, that challenges ‘rise of the West’ theories.
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The approach is chronological, so any section is suitable for our purpose. The
entire book is 200 pages.
Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A History of the 19th
Century (New York: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2012).
[Original title, Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Geschichte
des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 2009)]
Theme 2: Historiography
“Global Times and Spaces: On Historicizing the Global,” History Workshop
Journal 64 (2007): articles by Driver, Burton, Berg, Subrahmanyan, Boal.
Homi Bhabha, Locations of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).
Jerry Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship
(American Historical Association, 1996).
A useful overview of world history by the preeminent scholar in the
field. Divides scholarship into three groups, philosophers of history, social
scientists, and professional historians, and lays out some directions for future
study.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Durham: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).
David Christian, “World History in Context” Journal of World History 14.4
(2003): 437–52.
Intriguing piece that aims to place world history in a much larger context. A good
introduction to the work of one of the most important proponents of big history.
Frederick Cooper, “What is the concept of globalization good for?” African
Affairs 100 (2001): 189-213.
Argues that the concept of globalization is inadequate for analysis of African
history as it presumes coherence and direction in the establishment of a global
economy. The paper calls for a more discerning process of analysis that does not
assume universal processes.
Frederick Cooper, “Globalization,” in Colonialism in Question: Theory,
Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
An excellent critical overview of what ‘globalization’ is (and is not) as an analytic
category, and some of the common fallacies that are perpetuated in the
scholarship (e.g. using globalization as an agent in an argument).
N.D. Davis, “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a
Global World,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 188–202.
Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, eds., The World System: Five hundred
years or five thousand? (London & New York, Routledge, 1993).
Includes wide range of perspectives regarding World Systems Theory, from
Wallerstein himself (focused on the development of capitalism) to more
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revisionist approaches of Gunder Frank (who challenges Wallerstein by using his
strict economic criteria to argue for a China-centred world economy), and AbuLughod (who sees the trade system across Eurasia from the 13th C as a World
System). Overall, the most encompassing text on the theory which, in many
forms, has come to dominate how scholars conceptualise global interactions.
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
A famous challenge to Eurocentrism and the traditional conception of early
modern global economy, Gunder Frank powerfully argues for the centrality of an
Asia-, and particularly China-dominated economic world. Reflecting the twentyfirst century relevance of the debate, Gunder Frank views European dominance
as a brief period in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centric global
economic system.
Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,”
American Historical Review 100.4 (1995): 1034-1060.
A short overview of the approaches to global history, and its relevance in the
modern, globalised world.
A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002).
A central text in many module reading lists, categorises the types and stages of
globalisation in world history before the modern period. Using a wide range of
geographical areas, approaches globalisation as not only the “rise of the West”
but also as a non-Western phenomenon.
Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” American Historical
Review 94.1 (1989): 1-10.
Provides analysis of historiography as centred on geographical zones and calls
for the establishment of closer ties with foreign historical communities that
utilises cross-disciplinary approaches. Attests to the interconnectedness of
human history. (I feel that this would make a great text for the introductory
stages of a Global History course.)
Michael Lang, “Globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History
78.4 (2006): 899-only to 914.
A slightly long but very thoughtful analysis of globalisation theories and how (or
how not) they help with history. The first part discusses what globalisation
might be and the second when it might have started.
Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global to World History,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 28 (1998): 385-395.
Mazlish, focusing on the terminology and approaches of the field, proposes a
division between global history and world history, the latter being focused on
civilizations with global history examining the history of globalization and the
development of modern phenomena.
Proposes a sharp division between global history and world history. Argues that
world history is focused on civilizations while global history should examine the
history of globalization and attempt to trace modern developments back into the
past.
Secondary reading: Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a
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Global Age,” American Historical Review 100.4 (1995): 1034-1060
Patrick O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for
the Restoration of Global History,” Journal of Global History 1.1 (2006): 339.
A broad introduction on the way in which global history has been done since
antiquity and why it was out-of-fashion for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The most efficient overview of the historiography and methodology of the global
history field. Looks at the two dominant approaches of connections and
comparisons, as well as the idea of “centric” histories either supporting or
challenging the “rise of the West”, and concludes that the restoration of global
history rests its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives with global
perspective.
Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and
Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
Argues that history begins about 1.7 million years ago, and should be included in
history courses. Makes the case that evolutionary psychology offers useful
explanatory tools for the historian. Pp. 190-202 are very accessible, but students
may wonder what he’s on about. Pp. 157-89 explain this better, but might be
hard going for undergraduates.
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(B) NODES OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
Theme 3: Oceans
D. Abulafia, “Mediterranean History as Global History,” History and Theory
50 (2011): 220–228.
Jerry Bentley, “Seas and Ocean Basins as Frameworks for Historical
Analysis.”
Geographical
Review
89.2
(1999):
215-225.
Conceptual piece that argues for a move away from a focus on nation states.
Suggests that seas and oceans can be used as useful frameworks for analysis.
Secondary reading: Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen. “A Maritime Response
to the Crisis in Area Studies,” Geographical Review 89.2 (1999): 161-168
Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean
Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005): 70024.
Shows the jurisdictional tangles that were such an important characteristic of
the early modern seas. Particularly notable for its analysis of how pirates
engaged in legal posturing. A good introduction to the work of one of the most
important scholars in the field.
Secondary reading: Lauren Benton, The search for sovereignty: law and
geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II, (London: Collins, 1972).
Frank J. A. Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port cities of Asia from the 16th-20th
Centuries (Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University Press 1989).
K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic
History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985): Chs. 3; 4.
Uma das Gupta, ed., The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500-1800.
Collected Essays of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004): Introduction by Sanjay Subrahamanyan; Ch. 1:
“The Maritime Merchant and Indian History”; Ch. 2: “India and the Indian
Ocean 1500-1800”.
John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press,
2006).
Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners in the Eighteenth Century (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, London, 1961).
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration
of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
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Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of
Oceanic Space.” The Geographical Review 89.2 (April 1999): 225-236.
Good accompaniment to analysis of international law and European dominance
over the world’s oceans. Contends that eastwards and westwards expansion
facilitated an international order determined and dominated by European
expansionist powers, offering that non-European trading networks remained
restricted to local seas in the early modern period.
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the
Indian Ocean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
Geoffrey Scammell, The World Encompassed: the first European maritime
empires c.800-1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
A text which appears on the majority of reading lists focused on trade in the premodern period. Looks at the maritime trading companies and empires,
particularly the English and Dutch in the later part of the period.
Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the
Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Maritime India: A History of the People and the
Sea (McPherson), Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century
(Arasaratnam), and Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800
(Furber)(New Delhi; USA: Oxford University Press, 2004): Ch. 3.
F. Trivellato, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent
Historical Work,” Journal of Modern History 82.1 (2010): 127-155.
C. K. Woodworth, “Ocean and Steppe: Early Modern World Empires,”
Journal of Early Modern History 11.6 (2007): 501-518.
An interesting piece as it puts together Empire, trade and ecology in early
modern Eurasia.
Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies. London and the Atlantic
Economy 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): Chs.
2; 3.
Theme 4: Cities
Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the
Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Frank J. A. Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port cities of Asia from the 16th-20th
Centuries (Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales University Press 1989).
Probably final chapter.
P. Burke, “Early modern Venice as a center of information and
communication,” Venice reconsidered: the history and civilization of an
Italian city-state, 1297 – 1799, J. Martin and D. Romano, eds. (Baltimore and
London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000): 390-408.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
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On the rise of the megacity in the developing world, and the links between these
and the contemporary global economy.
Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Imperial cities, overlapping territories and
intertwined histories,” in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial
Cities: landscape, display and identity (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999).
J. Dyster, “Argentine and Australian development compared,” Past and
Present 84 (August 1979).
Lionel Frost, The new urban frontier: urbanisation and city building in
Australasia and the American West (Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales
University Press, 1991).
Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the city (London: Macmillan, 2011).
Free-market appraisal of the importance of cities to the contemporary world.
Similar to much of Thomas Friedman’s work, but much more academicallyinformed.
Robert K. Home, “The Grand Modell’ of colonial settlement,” in Of planting
and planning: the making of British colonial cities (London: E & FN Spon,
1997).
British urban and town planning ideas exported to the colonies
B. De Munck and A. Winter, eds., Gated Communities?: Regulating Migration
in Early Modern Cities (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).
E.R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence
in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MA, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006).
David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of
cultural change (Oxford England; Cambrudge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1992).
The classic book on the emergence of post-Fordism. Also see his latest book
Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution 2012 - a series of
essays on the spatial impacts of contemporary global capitalism.
Anthony King, The Bungalow: the production of a global culture London;
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
A study of the emergence of the bungalow in India and its export as an ideal
dwelling type, especially to the English-speaking world.
Anthony King, Urbanism colonialism and the world economy (London; New
York: Routledge, 1990).
Good study of the imposition of imperial ideas about urbanism and urban
planning on the colonial landscape.
*Also see his “The world economy is everywhere: urban history and the
world system,” Urban History 10, May 1983.
Frederic C. Lane, Venice. A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973).
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JW McCarty, “Australian capital cities in the nineteenth century,” Australian
Economic History Review X:2 (September 1970).
Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Vintage
Books, 2004).
Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City
of London, 1660-1740 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University
of Copenhagen, 2005).
John Merriman McClain and Kaoru Ugawa, “Ch.1: Edo and Paris: Cities of
Power,” in John Merriman McClain and Kaoru Ugawa, eds., Edo and Paris:
Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1994): 3-40.
One of the few books that tries to compare cities, in this case Edo and Paris. It
provides a very different perspective to traditional urban/city-by-city histories.
Lewis Mumford, The city in history (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989).
(Original submission dated the text at 1961)
The classic text on the emergence and history of the (western) city.
Derek Keene, “Cities and Cultural Exchange,” in Donatella Calabi and
Stephen Turk Christensen, eds., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe
vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2007): 3-27.
A comparative study of how the degree to which a city was the expression of a
programmatic cultural identity associated with a state or surrounding territory
and the extent to which it was a site of free intellectual and commercial exchange
determined the absorption, transfer, or exchange of cultural influence. Ch. 2 by
Alex Cowen, “Nodes, networks and hinterlands,” is also relevant.
Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short, Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of
Immigrant Gateway Cities (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
A series of case studies of immigrant gateway cities, old and new.
Brian Pullan, Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 2004).
E.N. Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice
and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo,(Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001) (first published 1991).
The emergence of the post-industrial, information-based global city from the
1970s onward. Somewhat dated now (esp. in relation to Tokyo) but an
important milestone book. Also see later updates and derivations.
Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge,
2002).
Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: the imperial metropolis (New Haven: Tale
University Press, 2001).
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Both deal with only the metropolitan side of the same issues as King and Home.
F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno,
and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
F. Trivellato, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent
Historical Work,” Journal of Modern History 82.1 (2010): 127-155.
Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies. London and the Atlantic
Economy 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Sharon Zukin, The culture of cities (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
US (indeed mostly New York-focussed) study of deindustrialisation and the
emergence of culture and cultural production as key drivers of urban economies
in the contemporary West.
Sharon Zukin, Naked city: the death and life of authentic urban places
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Something of an update to the ‘culture’ book, but some interesting discussions on
the impact of non-European immigration to New York in the 1980s and 1990s,
and the retention of aspects of these cultures and their adaptation (including
economic adaptation) to these new environments.
Theme 5: The Body
Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A. Freaks in the American Cultural Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in
Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993).
Nicolas Bancel, Human Zoos: From the Hottentot Venus to Reality Shows
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
A. Bashford, “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health,” History of
the Human Sciences 91.1 (2006): 67–88.
C. A. Bayly, ‘From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa
1600–2000’, in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History,
ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Anand Yang, Honolulu, 2005.
Argues for the existence of a period of archaic globalization that was
underpinned by three developments: universalizing kingship, the expansion of
cosmic religions and understandings of bodily health. An innovative analysis of
early forms of global networks.
Sierra Bruckner, “Voelkerschauen, Spectacles of (Human) Nature:
Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust," in
Matti Bunzl and Glenn Penny, eds., Worldly Provincialism: German
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Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2002).
William Bynum and Linda Kalof, A Cultural History of the Human Body, Vol.
6 (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2010).
Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American
History (Princeton: New Jersey, 2000).
Anne Dreesbach, Colonial Exhibitions, Voelkerschauen, and the Display of
the Other, in: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/models-and-stereotypes/thewild-and-the-civilized/anne-dreesbach-colonial-exhibitions-voelkerschauenand-the-display-of-the-other, published 2012-05-03.
Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic
Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy. A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore;
London: Johns Hopkins University, 1997).
Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History,
1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of
Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone, 2002).
Beverly Lemire, “Fashioning Global Trade: Indian Textiles, Gender
Meanings and European Consumers, 1500-1800,” in Giorgio Riello and
Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian
Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards:
Gender and Sexual Anxieties in Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade. Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in
Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
James C. Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001): 32-57.
Chronology, geography, and context of the modern rise in life expectancy.
Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and
Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Pages 59-74 are on smell: like the other chapters, introduces the way the senses
have been used in different societies to mark class and race.
14
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Rosemary Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the
Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
15
(C) MODES OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
Theme 6: Trade (Movement of goods and services)
David Abulafia, ‘The Role of Trade in Muslim-Christian Contact during the
Middle Ages’, in Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock, eds., The Arab
Influence in Medieval Europe (Reading: Ithaca Press: 1994): 1-24.
Suggests that Western and Islamic economies were increasingly interdependent
in the medieval period but Europeans gained little understanding of Islamic
culture. Their contact with Muslims was almost entirely commercial because
merchants were confined within fonduqs, enclaves of European traders.
Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide
Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American
Historical Review 109.5 (2004): 1405-1438.
Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: a history of Central
Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century:
Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer
Goods,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85-142.
Maxine argues that it was Asian luxuries that sparkled the Industrial revolution.
A very bold and challenging hypothesis that puts together trade, material culture
and the ‘old horse’ of the Industrial Revolution.
Huw Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial
Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1997).
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of
the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
A very accessible book that examines several objects in famous Vermeer
paintings that could only have been there for the fact of global trade networks
between SE Asia/China/Japan/North America and the Netherlands/Europe.
Ann Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “Joint Stock Chartered Trading
Companies,” Journal of Economic History 56 (1996): 916-25.
K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic
History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985): Chs. 3; 4.
Wang Eang Cheong, Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in SinoWestern Trade, 1684-1798 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997).
16
David Christian, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World
History,” Journal of World History, 11.1 (2000): 1-26.
Christian looks at what he terms “transecological” interactions between the
pastoralist and agrarian areas of the Silk Road, rather than simply
conceptualising the network as a “transcivilisational” exchange. Important
emphasis on the role of the local in the global: the Silk Road as a global network
was only created by subsystems of regional trade.
Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the
West,” American Historical Review, 104.5 (1999): 1497-1511.
William Crossgrove et al, “Colonialism, International Trade, and the Nationstate”, in Lucile F. Newman, ed., Hunger in History. Food Shortage, Poverty,
and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 215-40.
A clunky but useful basic introduction to the world history of famine, stressing
the importance of European expansion but also of local political structures.
Wayne Curtis, And A Bottle of Rum: A History of the World in Ten Cocktails
(USA: Crown Publishing Group, 2006).
Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behavior and the
household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press,
2006).
Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 16001834 (London: British Library, 2002).
James Fichter, So Great a Profit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed
Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010).
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic
Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13.2
(2002): 391-427.
Flynn and Giraldez have written extensively about silver and here they argue
that precious metals were fundamental in the first phase of globalisation in the
Early Modern period.
Two of the most important scholars of silver, argue that precious metals were
fundamental in the first stage of globalisation in the early modern period,
usefully identifying two main phases of silver flow and economic integration.
Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): 1-18 (Introduction, “Spices: A Global
Commodity”); 164-192 (Ch. 7: “Searching for the Realms of Spices”); 193214 (Ch. 8: “Finding the Realms of Spices”).
Examines why there was such a huge demand for spices in Europe between c.
1000-1513 and how the spice market launched Europe on the path to overseas
conquest.
17
Holden Furber, Rival empires of trade, Europe and the World in the Age of
Expansion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1976).
Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners in the Eighteenth Century (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, London, 1961).
Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740 (Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1981).
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Analyses the representational practices that Europeans took with them to
America and deployed when they described what they saw and did there.
Greenblatt argues that wonder was a recurring feature of the early discourse
concerning the new world.
Avner Greif, “Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the
Maghribi Traders,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 857-882.
David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American
Trade and Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
Similar to above, but specific to still life paintings, and constructs an argument
that’s also about ways of seeing and visual culture, rather than just trade
networks.
Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade,
African Studies Series 49 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
J.E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A study in
international trade and development (Cambridge England; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
William Keller and Louis Pauly, “Globalization at Bay,” Current History
(November 1997), 370-376.
Attests that multinational corporations are shaped by national political
structures and serve primarily national interests, and therefore are not
‘globalized’.
Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
The best short survey I know. Chapter 3, on Africa, is a wonderful summary of
that continent’s growing participation in the world system. Chapter 4, on
European organization of the slave trade, is a superb survey of the Atlantic trade.
Kris E. Lane, Color of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder
Empires (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010).
18
Beverly Lemire, “Fashioning Global Trade: Indian Textiles, Gender
Meanings and European Consumers, 1500-1800,” in Giorgio Riello and
Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian
Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
Peter J. Marshall, “The English in Asia to 1700,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire: the Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998): 264-285 (Ch. 12).
Peter J. Marshall, “The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700-1765,” in
P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 487-450 (Ch. 22).
Rudi Mathee, “Exotic Substances: The Introduction and Global Spread of
Tobacco, Coffee, Cocoa, Tea, and Distilled Liquor, Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries,” in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, eds. Drugs and Narcotics in
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Traces the remarkably rapid spread of these important substances. Short essay
that opens up a range of possibilities for further study.
Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and
Transformation. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Trade and cultural-religious links between India, the Middle East, Europe, China
and SE Asia through the prism of textiles.
Anne E. McCants, “Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of
Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Journal of
World History 28.4 (2007): 433-462.
N. MacGregor, “The First Global Economy (1450 - 1600 AD),” A History of
the
World
in
100
Objects,
BBC,
20
September
20.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tnkdj#>
Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City
of London, 1660-1740 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University
of Copenhagen, 2005).
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York: Viking, 1985).
Pioneering work that examines the transformation of sugar from a sixteenth
century luxury to a eighteenth century staple. Brings together world history and
food in a particularly innovative way.
Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches. Technological Creativity and Economic
Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): 151-192 (Chapter 7).
Mokyr uses a comparative approach to show the trajectories of technological
development of different areas of the world, in particular China and Europe.
Karl Moore and David Lewis, Multinationals, Transcontinentals and
Entrepreneurs: 2000 Years of International Business (Unpub.), 6-7, 12-13,
25-31, 45-47, 48, 100, 108-112, 125-127, and 142.
See also:
19
Karl Moore and David Lewis, Birth of the multinational: 2000 years of
ancient business history from Ashur to Augustus (Copenhagen: Copenhagen
Business School Press, 1999).
A history of the multinational and the world economy from 2000 B.C. to 100 A.D.
Karl Moore and David Lewis, The origins of globalization (New York:
Routledge, 2009).
Analyses the businesses practices of the ancient world and argues that a mixed
economy existed at this time, exhibiting many of the characteristics generally
associated with present-day globalization.
Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert
Associations in Northern Europe 1603-1746 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
Om Prakash, “The Indian Maritime Merchant, 1500-1800,” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 47.3 (2004): 435-457.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Review Article: The Great Divergence,” Past and
Present 176 (2002): 275-293.
Probably the best critique of Pomeranz’s important book. Parthasarathi argues
that consumption and technology should be given more space in narratives of
divergence.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created:
Society, Culture, and the World Economy 2nd edition (New York: M.E. Sharpe,
2006).
Breaks down global economic historical processes into short, accessible articles
that reveal the ancient roots of present-day globalization. Great entry-level text
with topics so diverse as to be applicable to many facets of economic history.
Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions of East African
Consumerism,” American Historical Review 109.3 (2004): 755-782.
Jacob Price, “What did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas
Trade 1660-1790,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 267-284.
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the
Indian Ocean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
Brian Pullan, Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 2004).
John F. Richards, ed., Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early
Modern Worlds (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1983).
Emma Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic,” Past &
Present, 192.1 (2006): 67-108.
This piece is more on flows of human capital, but it is an important addition for
discussing empires & peripheries, migration and other issues relating to global
trade.
20
Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic
Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Why do humans collaborate with each other? This simple question starts one of
the most exciting analyses of our love for complex organisational structures (like
Universities).
Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2006).
Laichen Sun, “Chinese Military Technology Transfers and the Emergence of
Northern Mainland Southeast Asia, c. 1390-1527,” Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies 34.3 (2003): 495-517.
Examines the spread of Chinese gunpowder technology to Southeast Asia across
both overland and maritime routes. Moves away from the conventional focus on
Europeans as the primary agent of technology transfer. Argues for the existence
of a military revolution in Chinese history.
Jean Gelman Taylor, “Meditations on a portrait from seventeenth-century
Batavia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37.1 (2006): 23-41.
Looks at a famous family portrait in the Rijksmuseum as pictorial evidence of
migration, Asian-European intermarriage, and living in a hybrid Dutch-Asian
idiom in the VOC period. Also traces the social biography of the painting as
further evidence of moving goods and ideas.
James B. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the
Early Modern World 1350-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Mira Wilkins, “Multinational Corporations: An Historical Account,” in
Richard Kozul-Wright and Bob Rowthorn (eds.), Transnational
corporations and the global economy (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press Ltd; New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1998): 1-32.
John E. Wills, “European consumption and Asian production in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” in Porter and Brewer (eds),
Consumption and the World of Goods (London; New York : Routledge, 1993).
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
Fairly classic expansion of Europe approach. Ch. 6 on the fur trade is a less usual
focus; Ch. 7 on Atlantic slave trade; Ch. 8 on “Trade and Conquest in the Orient”.
Frances Wood, The Silk Road: two thousand years in the heart of Asia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies. London and the Atlantic
Economy 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
21
Theme 7: Technology (Movement of goods and services)
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. Science, Technology, and
Ideologies of Western Dominance (New York: Cornell University Press,
1989): 21-127 (chapters 1-2).
A very creative and important book that is however little known. It argues that
Europeans used technology as a way to evaluate other parts of the world in the
early modern period.
David Christian, “The Silk Roads in World History,” Journal of World History
11.1 (2000): 1-26.
One of the best pieces on the silk roads, Christian explains how different areas in
the long-distance trade between the extremes of Eurasia complemented each
other environmentally.
Theme 8: Diaspora and migration (Movement of people)
P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter of the Colonial World in
the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989).
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997).
Cohen proposes a series of case studies of diasporas. An excellent book; very
suitable for students.
Robin Cohen, “Diasporas, the Nation-State and Globalization,” in Wang
Gungwu (ed.), Global History and Migrations (Boulder, Colorado: Westview
Press, 1997): 117-143.
Analyses the broader historical ramifications of forced and voluntary migration.
B. De Munck and A. Winter, eds., Gated Communities?: Regulating Migration
in Early Modern Cities (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).
E.R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence
in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MA, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006).
Louis Hartz (ed), The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the
United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York,
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964).
John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press,
2006).
Giovanni Gozzini, “The global system of international migrations, 1900 and
2000: a comparative approach,” Journal of Global History 1.3 (2006): 321341.
A neat way to compare present and past and challenge the idea that the present
is more globalised than the past. Gozzini shows that this might not be true for
migrations.
22
Wang Gungwu, “Migrations and Its Enemies,” in Bruce Mazlish,
Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993): 131-151.
Considers the Atlantic slave trade and Jewish diaspora in the context of
discussing involuntary migration.
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration
of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
The best short survey I know. Chapter 3, on Africa, is a wonderful summary of
that continent’s growing participation in the world system. Chapter 4, on
European organization of the slave trade, is a superb survey of the Atlantic trade.
Peter Linebough and Marcus Rediker: The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston: Verso, 2000).
J. Lucassen, and L. Lucassen, “The mobility transition revisited, 1500–1900:
what the case of Europe can offer to global history,” Journal of Global
History 4.3 (2009): 347 -377.
JW McCarty, “Australia as a region of recent settlement in the nineteenth
century,” Australian Economic History Review XII: 2 (September 1973).
Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846-1940.” Journal of World History
15.2 (2004): 155-189.
Argues for a global approach by examining three major circuits of long-distance
migration, the Americas, North Asia and Southeast Asia. Suggests that mass
migration reached a new peak in the 1920s. One of the best short examinations
of mass migration.
Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert
Associations in Northern Europe 1603-1746 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
Marie Price and Lisa Benton-Short, Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of
Immigrant Gateway Cities (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
A series of case studies of immigrant gateway cities, old and new.
E.N. Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice
and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Emma Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic,” Past &
Present, 192.1 (2006): 67-108.
This piece is more on flows of human capital, but it is an important addition for
discussing empires & peripheries, migration and other issues relating to global
trade.
Jean Gelman Taylor, “Meditations on a portrait from seventeenth-century
Batavia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37.1 (2006): 23-41.
Looks at a famous family portrait in the Rijksmuseum as pictorial evidence of
23
migration, Asian-European intermarriage, and living in a hybrid Dutch-Asian
idiom in the VOC period. Also traces the social biography of the painting as
further evidence of moving goods and ideas.
F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno,
and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
Sharon Zukin, Naked city: the death and life of authentic urban places
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Something of an update to the ‘culture’ book, but some interesting discussions on
the impact of non-European immigration to New York in the 1980s and 1990s,
and the retention of aspects of these cultures and their adaptation (including
economic adaptation) to these new environments.
Theme 9: Travel (Movement of people)
Ibn Battuta, (translated by H. A. R. Gibb), The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D.
1325-1354, Vol. 4 (London 1994): 947.
Mary Campbell, The Witness and the World: Exotic European Travel writing
400-1600 (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).
N.D. Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale
(London: Granta, 1992).
Deborah Howard, “The Status of the Oriental Traveller in Renaissance
Venice,” in Reorienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East,
Gerald MacLean, ed. (Houndmills Basingstoke- NY: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005): 29-49.
Examines the importance of knowledge about faraway places in Venetian culture.
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Chatham,
Kent: Macmillan, 1996): 133-180 (Ch. 3: “The Triumph of the Book”).
In Ch. 3, Jardine discusses the significance of the shift from manuscript to print
on the wider dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. It also examines the
more rigorous and systematic attempts by authorities to monitor controversial
books through censorship and the Inquisition.
Peter Mancall, ed., Bringing the World to early Modern Europe: Travel
Accounts and their Audiences (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007).
Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia; an introduction to his ‘description of
the world called “il Milione”’ (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1960): 127-146 (Ch. 4: “Aspects of Asiatic Civilization in Marco Polo’s
book”).
Argues that Marco Polo’s interest in his text is primarily in the human geography
of Asia and that he was a proto ethnographer in his approach to the customs he
observed.
24
Evan Osnos, "The Grand Tour: Europe on Fifteen Hundred Yuan a Day," New
Yorker, 18 April 2011.
A very amusing piece on a group of Chinese on a package holiday around Europe.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London; New York: Routledge, 1992).
Theme 10: Religion (Movement of ideas)
David Abulafia, ‘The Role of Trade in Muslim-Christian Contact during the
Middle Ages’, in Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock, eds., The Arab
Influence in Medieval Europe (Reading: Ithaca Press: 1994): 1-24.
Suggests that Western and Islamic economies were increasingly interdependent
in the medieval period but Europeans gained little understanding of Islamic
culture. Their contact with Muslims was almost entirely commercial because
merchants were confined within fonduqs, enclaves of European traders.
C. A. Bayly, ‘From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa
1600–2000’, in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History,
ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Anand Yang, Honolulu, 2005.
Argues for the existence of a period of archaic globalization that was
underpinned by three developments: universalizing kingship, the expansion of
cosmic religions and understandings of bodily health. An innovative analysis of
early forms of global networks.
N.D. Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).
Richard Eaton, “Islamic History as Global History,” in Michael Adas, ed.,
Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993):
A highly useful analysis of the role of religion in the formation of global
networks. Focusing on the nature of the highly integrated area of Afro-Eurasian
created by the expansion of Islam (the first ‘global civilization’), Eaton
persuasively argues that the “Dar al-Islam” should be viewed as dynamic,
adaptive and syncretic. Eaton both summarises traditional approaches, and
supports new theories of “Islamization” to develop an understanding of Islam as
a global civilization.
Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The
Umma Below the Winds (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003).
About globalization and Islam in SE Asia, focusing on Indonesian examples –
links in the Islamic world through travelling scholars, through pilgrimage to
Mecca, through anti-colonial politics; even a chapter on how Muslims in
Indonesia thought about Meiji Japan as an alternative power.
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the
Indian Ocean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
25
Theme 11: Science (Movement of ideas)
Global Histories of Science focus of Isis vol. 101, no. 1 (2010).
W. Anderson, “Where is the Post-Colonial History of Medicine?” Bulletin of
the History of Medicine 72.3 (1998): 522–530.
A. Bashford, “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health,” History of
the Human Sciences 91.1 (2006): 67–88.
Sierra Bruckner, “Voelkerschauen, Spectacles of (Human) Nature:
Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust," in
Matti Bunzl and Glenn Penny, eds., Worldly Provincialism: German
Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2002).
Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The
Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001) (relevant articles).
Harold John Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in
the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Anne Dreesbach, Colonial Exhibitions, Voelkerschauen, and the Display of
the Other, in: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/models-and-stereotypes/thewild-and-the-civilized/anne-dreesbach-colonial-exhibitions-voelkerschauenand-the-display-of-the-other, published 2012-05-03.
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York; London: Norton,
1981).
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
About how tropical ecologies presented unique challenges to European colonists,
who made scientific and agricultural advances through trial and errror; global
scientific networks based on colonial experience; and the colonial origins of
western conservation movements.
Sandra Hardin, ed., The Racial Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic
Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
John Hoberman, Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the
Dehumanization of Sport (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
S. Hodges, “The Global Menace,” Social History of Medicine 25.3 (2012): 719728.
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Chatham,
Kent: Macmillan, 1996): 133-180 (Ch. 3: “The Triumph of the Book”).
In Ch. 3, Jardine discusses the significance of the shift from manuscript to print
on the wider dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. It also examines the
26
more rigorous and systematic attempts by authorities to monitor controversial
books through censorship and the Inquisition.
Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of
Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone, 2002).
Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Reason and Value in Global
Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Michael A. Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social
Identity in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004).
Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How fingerprinting was born in
colonial India (Basingstoke; Oxford: Pan Books, 2004).
George W. Stocking, ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays in Biological
Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
George W. Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
Andrew Zimmerman, “Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the
Transnational History of Empire,” New Global Studies 4.1 (2010).
Theme 12: Ideology (Movement of ideas)
Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London; New York: Routledge,
1990).
Urs Bitterli, “Cultural Collision: The Spaniards on Hispaniola,” in Urs
Bitterli, ed., Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between Europeans and nonEuropean cultures 1492-1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989): 71-86.
Argues that after the extermination of many native inhabitants of Hispaniola in
the mid-1490s Spanish authorities made some attempts to subject the fact of
cultural contact to theoretical analysis and legal control. The limitations of latemedieval legal concepts and a Christocentric world view doomed these efforts to
failure.
Tim Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27
Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for
Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
Draws together themes of post-colonial independence movement, Third World
nationalism, Cold War divisions and international attention. Argues that the
Algerian Revolution's primary offensive was diplomatic, and that the war was
won on the stage of international opinion rather than in the military realm.
Kate Davies, “A Moral Purchase: femininity, commerce and abolition 17881792,” in Eger, Grant et al. Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 17001830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York; London: Norton,
1981).
D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992): 131-62 (“The Apogee of Nationalism,
1918-1950”).
Now a bit dated, but still a great survey of the spread and adaptation of a
European concept.
Merry Weisner Hanks, Gender in History: Global Perspectives (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Sandra Hardin, ed., The Racial Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic
Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Chatham,
Kent: Macmillan, 1996): 133-180 (Ch. 3: “The Triumph of the Book”).
In Ch. 3, Jardine discusses the significance of the shift from manuscript to print
on the wider dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. It also examines the
more rigorous and systematic attempts by authorities to monitor controversial
books through censorship and the Inquisition.
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination
from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007):
“Introduction.”
First clarifies terminology of genocide studies and briefly traces the history of
internationally-recognized legal frameworks and institutions in use today.
Categorizes historical genocide and extermination cases as driven by ideological,
agricultural and/or expansionist factors.
Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
Traces the emergence of a liberal sensibility relating to international matters in
the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent decline after the Second World
War. Argues that international law was born from the impulse to 'civilize' late
nineteenth-century attitudes towards race and society.
28
Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and
Transformation. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Trade and cultural-religious links between India, the Middle East, Europe, China
and SE Asia through the prism of textiles.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards:
Gender and Sexual Anxieties in Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).
George W. Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political order and
the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca New York: Cornell University
Press, 1995).
Analyses the erotics of power in early modern Iberia and compares the patterns
of gendered dominance and submission with those in the native American world.
Andrew Zimmerman, “Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the
Transnational History of Empire,” New Global Studies 4.1 (2010).
Theme 13: Ecology and Environment (Movement of biota)
David Christian, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World
History,” Journal of World History, 11.1 (2000): 1-26.
Christian looks at what he terms “transecological” interactions between the
pastoralist and agrarian areas of the Silk Road, rather than simply
conceptualising the network as a “transcivilisational” exchange. Important
emphasis on the role of the local in the global: the Silk Road as a global network
was only created by subsystems of regional trade.
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Classic study of how European diseases, plants and animals ‘colonized’ the ‘new
world’.
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003): 35-63 (Chapter 2).
A classic and a very lively read. Crosby coined the term ‘Columbian exchange’
with this book.
The central text on the integration of the globe through
ecological/environmental factors, Crosby terms the exchange of crops, diseases
and animals that followed the discovery of the Americas the “Columbian
exchange”, and shows how it was highly important in the development of a
globalisation.
29
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1998).
Not everyone might agree with Diamond, but this is the right text for a good
discussion, in particular on the role on the environment and animals in human
history.
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
About how tropical ecologies presented unique challenges to European colonists,
who made scientific and agricultural advances through trial and errror; global
scientific networks based on colonial experience; and the colonial origins of
western conservation movements.
Robert B. Marks, “Commercialization without Capitalism: Processes of
Environmental Change in South China, 1550-1850’, Environmental History 1
(1996): 56-82.
The commercialization of agriculture produced by the rise in demand resulting
from growth in world trade led to large-scale changes in land use, including
massive deforestation.
Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological
Narrative 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Tries to construct a non-Eurocentric world history, largely emphasizing
economic growth and state power, that challenges ‘rise of the West’ theories.
The approach is chronological, so any section is suitable for our purpose. The
entire book is 200 pages.
Stephen Pyne, Vestal Fire: an environmental history, told through fire, if
Europe and Europe’s encounter with the world (Seattle & London: University
of Washington Press, 1997): 463-99.
Explores the impact of European fire practices on other parts of the world, and
European responses to different fire regimes in other places.
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment
(Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge; New York:
Cambridge University Press 2008): 152- 194.
Starts with plague in China as an example of the creation of a microbial
globalism, through to the impact of European, Russian, and American
colonialism. Other parts of the book are also valuable.
John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier. An Environmental History of the
Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 17-57.
Argues there was unprecedented human-caused environmental change in
different parts of the world, produced by European expansion and by new
technologies and state-building both in Europe and in other parts of the world.
Pages 58-85 examine the evidence for a world-wide ‘little ice age’ and draw
some conclusions about its impact on human societies.
C. K. Woodworth, “Ocean and Steppe: Early Modern World Empires,”
Journal of Early Modern History 11.6 (2007): 501-518.
30
An interesting piece as it puts together Empire, trade and ecology in early
modern Eurasia.
Theme 14: Disease (Movement of biota)
D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in
Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993).
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Classic study of how European diseases, plants and animals ‘colonized’ the ‘new
world’.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the
Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1998).
Not everyone might agree with Diamond, but this is the right text for a good
discussion, in particular on the role on the environment and animals in human
history.
W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Books, 1998): 14184 (Ch. 4: “The Impact of the Mongol Empire”).
One of the central texts on the multifaceted role of disease in world history,
simultaneously creating and destroying global networks. Looks at the
demographic, technological, and epidemiological aspects of global disease, as
well as its political, economic and cultural consequences.
Another classic in world history. McNeill complements Crosby’s analysis by
focusing on illness as one of the major connectors in world history.
Offers an interpretation of world history via the political, demographic,
ecological, and psychological impact of disease on cultures. Considers how trade,
migration and travel have brought cultures into contact with one another
through the transference of disease.
Theme 15: Empires (Structures of encounter)
David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of
Columbus (New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 2008).
Analyses the encounters of Europeans and the inhabitants of the Americas from
1341 until the early 16th century and the ways in which these early contacts
shaped European perceptions of the world.
Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty, and the making of international
law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52-62, 84-87.
Traces the emergence of legal positivism and what constituted ‘civilized’ nations,
based on territorial sovereignty. Demonstrates how international law facilitated
dominance of imperial powers.
Urs Bitterli, “Cultural Collision: The Spaniards on Hispaniola,” in Urs
Bitterli, ed., Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between Europeans and nonEuropean cultures 1492-1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989): 71-86.
31
Argues that after the extermination of many native inhabitants of Hispaniola in
the mid-1490s Spanish authorities made some attempts to subject the fact of
cultural contact to theoretical analysis and legal control. The limitations of latemedieval legal concepts and a Christocentric world view doomed these efforts to
failure.
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
Argues that there was an Ottoman Age of Exploration that parallels European
developments. Demonstrates that “Ottomans of the sixteenth century were able
to act as protagonists of the first order in creating a newly integrated world
system of competing imperial states.”
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).
William Crossgrove et al, “Colonialism, International Trade, and the Nationstate”, in Lucile F. Newman, ed., Hunger in History. Food Shortage, Poverty,
and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 215-40.
A clunky but useful basic introduction to the world history of famine, stressing
the importance of European expansion but also of local political structures.
P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter of the Colonial World in
the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989).
John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 14002000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).
A text which features in every global history module on the development of
imperialism and empire. Challenges a Eurocentric approach to empire and
focuses on the global nature of Asian empires from the Qing and Mughal to the
Ottoman.
Kathleen Deagan and José Maria Cruxent, Columbus Outpost among the
Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498 (New Haven: Yale
University press, 2002): 47-70 (Ch. 4: “Hell in Hispaniola: La Isabela 14931498”).
A study of the initial site of European settlement in America and the first place of
sustained interaction between Europeans and the indigenous Tainos.
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial
Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2006).
Anne Dreesbach, Colonial Exhibitions, Voelkerschauen, and the Display of
the Other, in: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/models-and-stereotypes/thewild-and-the-civilized/anne-dreesbach-colonial-exhibitions-voelkerschauenand-the-display-of-the-other, published 2012-05-03.
Felix Driver and David Gilbert, “Imperial cities, overlapping territories and
intertwined histories,” in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial
32
Cities: landscape, display and identity (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999).
John Elliot, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970).
A now classic study of how traditional European assumptions about geography,
theology, history and the nature of man were challenged by the encounter with
new peoples and lands.
Lionel Frost, The new urban frontier: urbanisation and city building in
Australasia and the American West (Kensington, N.S.W.: New South Wales
University Press, 1991).
Louis Hartz (ed), The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the
United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York,
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964).
John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press,
2006).
Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 16001834 (London: British Library, 2002).
Holden Furber, Rival empires of trade, Europe and the World in the Age of
Expansion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1976).
Anthony Grafton with Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, the power of
tradition and the shock of discovery (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
Examines the evidence about how the discovery of the New World shook the
foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that
Europeans so revered.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Analyses the representational practices that Europeans took with them to
America and deployed when they described what they saw and did there.
Greenblatt argues that wonder was a recurring feature of the early discourse
concerning the new world.
Anthony Grafton with Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, the power of
tradition and the shock of discovery (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
Examines the evidence about how the discovery of the New World shook the
foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that
Europeans so revered.
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
33
About how tropical ecologies presented unique challenges to European colonists,
who made scientific and agricultural advances through trial and errror; global
scientific networks based on colonial experience; and the colonial origins of
western conservation movements.
Robert K. Home, “The Grand Modell’ of colonial settlement,” in Of planting
and planning: the making of British colonial cities (London: E & FN Spon,
1997).
British urban and town planning ideas exported to the colonies
Anthony King, Urbanism colonialism and the world economy (London; New
York: Routledge, 1990).
Good study of the imposition of imperial ideas about urbanism and urban
planning on the colonial landscape.
*Also see his “The world economy is everywhere: urban history and the
world system,” Urban History 10, May 1983.
Kris E. Lane, Color of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder
Empires (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010).
John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999): 8-30 (Ch. 1: “Images of Asia and the Coming of the
Mongols”); 88-104 (Ch. 5: “The Description of the World”).
Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of
Oceanic Space.” The Geographical Review 89.2 (April 1999): 225-236.
Good accompaniment to analysis of international law and European dominance
over the world’s oceans. Contends that eastwards and westwards expansion
facilitated an international order determined and dominated by European
expansionist powers, offering that non-European trading networks remained
restricted to local seas in the early modern period.
Peter J. Marshall, “The English in Asia to 1700,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire: the Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998): 264-285 (Ch. 12).
Peter J. Marshall, “The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700-1765,” in
P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 487-450 (Ch. 22).
JW McCarty, “Australia as a region of recent settlement in the nineteenth
century,” Australian Economic History Review XII: 2 (September 1973).
M. O'Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice's Maritime
State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia; an introduction to his ‘description of
the world called “il Milione”’ (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1960): 127-146 (Ch. 4: “Aspects of Asiatic Civilization in Marco Polo’s
book”).
34
Argues that Marco Polo’s interest in his text is primarily in the human geography
of Asia and that he was a proto ethnographer in his approach to the customs he
observed.
Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade. Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in
Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From
Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven CT-London: Yale University Press,
1993): “Introduction”, Chs. 1-3.
Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: the Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
Geoffrey Scammell, The World Encompassed: the first European maritime
empires c.800-1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
A text which appears on the majority of reading lists focused on trade in the premodern period. Looks at the maritime trading companies and empires,
particularly the English and Dutch in the later part of the period.
CB Schedvin, “Staples and regions of Pax Britannia,” Economic History
Review, 2nd series XLIII: 4 (1990.)
Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: the imperial metropolis (New Haven: Tale
University Press, 2001).
Both deal with only the metropolitan side of the same issues as King and Home.
Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and
Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the
Early Modern Era (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
One of the best collections of essays on cross-cultural encounters and
interactions. Challenging past Eurocentric historiography on approaching other
cultures, looks at various aspects such as material culture, cartography, and
ethnography in the creation of cross-cultural perceptions and representations
across a broad geographical range, taking a two-way perspective on the impact
of encounters.
Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How fingerprinting was born in
colonial India (Basingstoke; Oxford: Pan Books, 2004).
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
James B. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the
Early Mondern World 1350-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political order and
the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca New York: Cornell University
Press, 1995).
Analyses the erotics of power in early modern Iberia and compares the patterns
of gendered dominance and submission with those in the native American world.
35
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
Fairly classic expansion of Europe approach. Chap. 6 on the fur trade is a less
usual focus; chap 7 on Atlantic slave trade; chap 8 on ‘Trade and Conquest in the
Orient’.
Richard White, The middle ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the
Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Hugely influential work that argues for the existence of a “place in between: in
between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of
villages.” Moved the discussion away from a focus on conquest to look at the
complex dynamics of contact.
Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies. London and the Atlantic
Economy 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Madeleine Zilfi, Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in
the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
Andrew Zimmerman, “Adventures in the Skin Trade: Physical
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter,” in Matti Bunzl and Glenn Penny,
eds., Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002): 156-178 .
Theme 16: Institutions (Structures of encounter)
Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty, and the making of international
law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52-62, 84-87.
Traces the emergence of legal positivism and what constituted ‘civilized’ nations,
based on territorial sovereignty. Demonstrates how international law facilitated
dominance of imperial powers.
Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The
Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001) (relevant articles).
William Keller and Louis Pauly, “Globalization at Bay,” Current History
(November 1997), 370-376.
Attests that multinational corporations are shaped by national political
structures and serve primarily national interests, and therefore are not
‘globalized’.
Martti Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
Traces the emergence of a liberal sensibility relating to international matters in
the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent decline after the Second World
War. Argues that international law was born from the impulse to 'civilize' late
nineteenth-century attitudes towards race and society.
36
Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of
Oceanic Space.” The Geographical Review 89.2 (April 1999): 225-236.
Good accompaniment to analysis of international law and European dominance
over the world’s oceans. Contends that eastwards and westwards expansion
facilitated an international order determined and dominated by European
expansionist powers, offering that non-European trading networks remained
restricted to local seas in the early modern period.
Mira Wilkins, “Multinational Corporations: An Historical Account,” in
Richard Kozul-Wright and Bob Rowthorn (eds.), Transnational
corporations and the global economy (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press Ltd; New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1998): 1-32.
37
(D) REPRESENTATIONS OF ENCOUNTER AND EXCHANGE
Theme 17: Maps and cartography
James R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of
Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Includes articles on Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, British and French use of maps
to consolidate territory.
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of
the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
A very accessible book that examines several objects in famous Vermeer
paintings that could only have been there for the fact of global trade networks
between SE Asia/China/Japan/North America and the Netherlands/Europe.
John Elliot, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970).
A now classic study of how traditional European assumptions about geography,
theology, history and the nature of man were challenged by the encounter with
new peoples and lands.
Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in
Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1983).
(Chapter on Distance.)
Martin W. Lewis, and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
The most useful text on how scholars have traditionally conceptualised the
globe, and new theories on how to approach its study. Offers overviews of
central ideas such as Toynbee’s civilizations approach, Wallerstein’s World
Systems theory, and other concepts of global connections.
Examines the logic behind standard geographical labels. Defines metageography
as the “set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of
the world” and sets out to deconstruct these. Proposes a new framework, world
regions, for dividing the globe.
 124-156 (Chapter 5).
Where does the division into continents come from? Lewis and Wigen
show that it is a very peculiar (and sometimes misguided) invention of
the West.
Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World (Berkeley CA: California
University Press, 1994).
Focuses on the historical and cultural specificity of the geographical imagination
of the 16th century map maker and traveller, André Thevet.
Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and
Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the
Early Modern Era (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
One of the best collections of essays on cross-cultural encounters and
38
interactions. Challenging past Eurocentric historiography on approaching other
cultures, looks at various aspects such as material culture, cartography, and
ethnography in the creation of cross-cultural perceptions and representations
across a broad geographical range, taking a two-way perspective on the impact
of encounters.
Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the
Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
John Short, Making Space, Revisioning the World 1475-1600 (Syracuse NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2004).
Examines the ways in which modern notions of space were developed in the 16th
century through new techniques of spatial surveillance. Short emphasizes the
role of occult practices in the emergence of new spatial sciences and suggests
that cartographic literacy was encouraged by the increasing importance of
agriculture as a commodity and the rising price of land.
Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation
(Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
Theme 18: Art and performance
Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A. Freaks in the American Cultural Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Nicolas Bancel, Human Zoos: From the Hottentot Venus to Reality Shows
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer
Goods,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85-142.
Maxine argues that it was Asian luxuries that sparkled the Industrial revolution.
A very bold and challenging hypothesis that puts together trade, material culture
and the ‘old horse’ of the Industrial Revolution.
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of
the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
A very accessible book that examines several objects in famous Vermeer
paintings that could only have been there for the fact of global trade networks
between SE Asia/China/Japan/North America and the Netherlands/Europe.
Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American
History (Princeton: New Jersey, 2000).
Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Analyses the representational practices that Europeans took with them to
America and deployed when they described what they saw and did there.
Greenblatt argues that wonder was a recurring feature of the early discourse
concerning the new world.
39
Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
Similar to above, but specific to still life paintings, and constructs an argument
that’s also about ways of seeing and visual culture, rather than just trade
networks.
Jean Gelman Taylor, “Meditations on a portrait from seventeenth-century
Batavia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37.1 (2006): 23-41.
Looks at a famous family portrait in the Rijksmuseum as pictorial evidence of
migration, Asian-European intermarriage, and living in a hybrid Dutch-Asian
idiom in the VOC period. Also traces the social biography of the painting as
further evidence of moving goods and ideas.
Rosemary Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the
Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Johan Verberckmoes, “The imaginative recreation of overseas cultures in
western European pageants in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries,” in
Herman Roodenburg, ed., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe vol. IV
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2007): 361-380.
Verberckmoes argues that representations of foreign peoples and cultures in
European parades depended on the state of knowledge about various territories
and the visual material available in the form of prints, paintings and material
objects. Foreign cultures were presented as subject to European influence and
authority but European audiences also subscribed to ideas about cultural
variations and accepted the specific circumstances of exotic presentations.
40
(E) USES OF GLOBAL HISTORY
Theme 19: Explaining uneven development
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. Science, Technology, and
Ideologies of Western Dominance (New York: Cornell University Press,
1989).
Adas is the main historian to deal with the role of early modern science and
technology in cross-cultural perceptions between Europe and Asia, following its
development from relative unimportance in the religiously-dominated sixteenth
century to scientific dominance in the eighteenth and nineteenth, where Adas
proposes it played a fundamental role in western imperialist ideologies. An
interesting and engaging account of the continuities and changes in western
perceptions of other cultures.
Tonio Andrade, “An accelerating divergence? The revisionist model of
world history and the question of Eurasian military parity: data from East
Asia.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 36.2 (Spring 2011): 185-208.
Contextualizes the revisionist debate on military modernization models of
European and Asian powers through closer examination of Sino-Dutch War
(1661-1668). Examines the Chinese Military Revolution of the fourteenth
century and makes clear, accessible commentary on technological hybridity.
Considers the timing of the divergence between Europe and Asia.
Antony Anghie, "Time Present and Time Past: Globalization, International
Financial Institutions, and the Third World," New York University Journal of
International Law and Politics 32 (2000).
Examines the impact of globalization on the Third World and the role that
international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank (Bank) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) play in promoting that globalization.
Considers the ramifications of colonialism in shaping globalization.
Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Collins, 1982): 11437; 581-99.
Essentially concerned with the development of capitalism and why it did not
continue to develop outside Europe. A classic text.
David Buck, “Was It Pluck or Luck that Made the West Grow Rich?” Journal
of World History 10.2 (1999): 413–30.
Examines three important books (Landes, Frank and Bin Wong) that each
provide differing explanations concerning the so-called rise of the
west. Accessible introduction to a key debate.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Durham: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the
West,” American Historical Review, 104.5 (1999): 1497-1511.
Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and
What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): Ch. 1:
“Falling Behind and Falling Apart.”
41
A best seller around the world, Collier addresses the issue of poverty in those
countries that ‘went wrong’. He uses demography, development theories and
reflects on the role of politics.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
On the rise of the megacity in the developing world, and the links between these
and the contemporary global economy.
Stanley Engerman and Patrick O’Brien, “The Industrial Revolution in Global
Perspective,” in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds., The Cambridge
Economic History of Modern Britain I (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004): 451-464.
Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Path Dependence, Time Lags and the
Birth of Globalization: a Critique of O’Rourke and Williamson,” European
Review of Economic History 8 (2004): 81-108.
Introduction to the work of two important scholars that have dominated the
debate about global silver markets. Argues that globalization commenced in
1571 with the establishment of reliable trans-Pacific connections. Suggests that
global prices did in fact converge twice in the early modern period—in 1640 and
again in 1750.
Secondary reading: Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History
Workshop Journal 63.1 (2007): 218-230.
Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History:
Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of
World History 13 (2002): 323-90.
Explores standard concepts relating to economic expansion and the Western
political hegemony (e.g. “modern”, “pre-modern”, etc.), arguing that these
overshadow analysis of economic, political, and social differences affecting
economic development across the globe.
Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, eds., The World System: Five hundred
years or five thousand? (London & New York, Routledge, 1993).
Includes wide range of perspectives regarding World Systems Theory, from
Wallerstein himself (focused on the development of capitalism) to more
revisionist approaches of Gunder Frank (who challenges Wallerstein by using his
strict economic criteria to argue for a China-centred world economy), and AbuLughod (who sees the trade system across Eurasia from the 13th C as a World
System). Overall, the most encompassing text on the theory which, in many
forms, has come to dominate how scholars conceptualise global interactions.
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
A famous challenge to Eurocentrism and the traditional conception of early
modern global economy, Gunder Frank powerfully argues for the centrality of an
Asia-, and particularly China-dominated economic world. Reflecting the twentyfirst century relevance of the debate, Gunder Frank views European dominance
as a brief period in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centric global
economic system.
42
J.E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A study in
international trade and development (Cambridge England; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics
in the History of Europe and Asia. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981) [3rd ed. 2003].
Criticized for Eurocentrism, but a foundational text.
David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Little, Brown
and Company, 1998): “Chapter 25: Empire and after.”
A very broad overview of the economic, sociocultural and political legacies of the
imperial age. Although Landes’ Eurocentricism has been outmoded by more
balanced recent writing, this chapter was chosen as it establishes a useful
schema.
Patrick Manning, "Asia and Europe in the World Economy: Introduction,"
The American Historical Review 107.2 (2002): 419-425.
Excellent summary of the work of a group of scholars, most notably Ken
Pomeranz, who have combined to push back the timeline of European economic
ascendancy past 1800.
Secondary reading: Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China,
Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological
Narrative 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Tries to construct a non-Eurocentric world history, largely emphasizing
economic growth and state power, that challenges ‘rise of the West’ theories.
The approach is chronological, so any section is suitable for our purpose. The
entire book is 200 pages.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Review Article: The Great Divergence,” Past and
Present 176 (2002): 275-293.
Probably the best critique of Pomeranz’s important book. Parthasarathi argues
that consumption and technology should be given more space in narratives of
divergence.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not
(Cambridge; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of
the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2000).
Dealing with the economic “divergence” between Europe and Asia, Pomeranz
argues that this was caused by two factors: coal and colonies. Emphasising
continuities as well as change, and on both Asia and Europe in explaining
economic and technological development.
 Ch. 2.
A well-known and difficult book. Pomeranz argues that the divergence
between Asia and Europe rested on two factors: coal and colonies.
43
William Thompson, “The Military Superiority Thesis and the Ascendancy of
Western Eurasia in the World System,” Journal of World History 10.1
(1999): 143-178.
Provides a good overview of Parker’s famous military revolution
argument. Argues for the importance of non-technological factors in explaining
European success.
Secondary reading: Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
(Durham: Duke University Press 2004).
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(F) MISCELLANEOUS
Linda Colley, The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
(New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008).
Essays by Dennis Owen Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, collected in China and
the Birth of Globalization in the 16th Century (Hampshire: Ashgate
Variorum, 2010).
Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (London: Penguin Books, 1989).
Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009).
Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Language, National Culture, and
Translated Modernity - China, 1900-1937 (California: Stanford University
Press, 1995).
Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and
Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet, eds., Minor Transnationalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies:
A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
Joanna Waley-Cohen, Sextants of Beijing: global currents in Chinese history
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999).
Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical
Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 88.1 (July 1982): 1-23.
Survey of the introduction of standard time zones. Not much about
consequences, but thought-provoking.
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